What is it?
Only when users find value in an application, they will continue utilizing it and they keep coming back. The Retention Score tracks how likely your users are to return to your application with metrics like stickiness, retention rate, or percentage of high-frequency users.
Why use it?
Retention is a key signal for ongoing value. If users find value in the application, they tend to come back to it regularly.
A low retention indicates that users might not see value in interacting regularly with an application or struggle to achieve the intended usage.
A high Retention Score has big impact on your business results:
- Higher app ROI
How is it calculated?
| R score | Average of the Retention Rate and Stickiness |
| Returning users | Number of users who returned to the application in the last 3 months |
| Retention rate | Ratio of returning users to all users |
| Stickiness | Average daily stickiness in the selected date range. Daily stickiness is the ratio of Weekly Active Users to Monthly Active Users on that day (WAU/MAU) |
| Weekly Active User | User with at least one engaged session in the last 7 days |
| Monthly Active User | User with at least one engaged session in the last 30 days |
Best Practices
Here are our 3 Tips for a high Retention Score:
1. Understand why
Conduct user research to understand why users are not retaining. How much value do people get from the application? What is the application being used for?
Understand whether there might be roadblocks in using the application. Something might be broken that keeps people from coming back / creates frustration.
2. Improve onboarding
Send users an email to invite them into your application and highlight the values of it.
3. Awareness and promotion
Send a reminder over email or other internal channels.
Include gamification.
